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Prison
I’ve experienced everything white “civilization” offers—jails and skid-row gutters, nightclubs and penthouses, airplanes, cars and trains, schools and universities—and there is nothing about the white man or his society that intimidates me. His clubs and guns and dogs and threats don’t scare me. I’ve faced them all. His religion doesn’t frighten me. I don’t fear his god any more than I dread the Great Mystery. In 1978, the only thing I hadn’t experienced was prison—but many people better than me had already gone there, so I never even considered going underground or into exile.
As soon as I went behind the walls, Sid Strange, my lawyer, requested another writ of habeas corpus from Judge Alfred Nichol. In his oral argument, Strange said the few Indians convicted for their roles in the Sioux Falls courthouse police riot were the only ones ever convicted under that South Dakota statute; it was arbitrary and malicious prosecution. Nichol denied the writ, then lectured from the bench. He said that had I raised this issue to the South Dakota courts, “my decision probably would have gone the other way.” I wanted to hit Sid upside the head. The son of a bitch! He’s a lawyer—he should have known that was what he was supposed to do! Two years later, the South Dakota legislature repealed the law I had been convicted of breaking, but refused to apply the change retroactively.
I entered prison at a time when an Irish patriot named Bobby Sands had starved himself to death in Belfast’s notorious Long Kesh Prison to protest England’s colonization of Northern Ireland. I felt the same kind of love for my own land and people. When I went to prison, I made up my mind to show my people exactly how I felt by beginning a spiritual fast that could end with my death.
My incarceration was big news around the Great Plains. The whites had finally gotten me. Like all prison newcomers, I was allowed out of my cell only for meals. I lay on my bunk in a cell six feet by eight, feeling the thick walls around me. I was in “Granite City”—the South Dakota State Penitentiary. I wasn’t going to go over those walls, under them, through them. The only way out, I knew, was to walk through the same door I had come in. As I lay there, I acknowledged the walls and their power. I thought, since I’m imprisoned, I’m going to act as if I’m in prison. I won’t do anything that will offend anyone. I’m going to do my time and not complain.
The Indian inmates treated me like a Mafia don. A steady stream of trusties came by my cell, each bringing gifts. Where men are locked behind bars and denied all contact with women, there is little available to them that they consider more precious than such magazines as Playboy, Hustler, and Penthouse. The Indian residents of that penitentiary honored me with many pristine copies of the latest issues of those and other magazines. I also received cigarettes, which are currency behind the walls. They arrived like offerings by the handful, by the pack, by the carton. Other trusties smuggled cookies and candy into my cell. I knew they were giving me what they valued most, and it made me feel indebted and very humble.
When I entered the dining hall for the first time, I saw Dicky Marshall, who was serving life for having killed Martin Montileaux, sharing a corner table with three other Indians. He had one of them leave and invited me to join him. I didn’t eat, but spent a few minutes catching up with Dicky. After the first ten days, I was assigned to a permanent cell, the last on Cellblock D, the fifth and topmost tier. It was in a corner, with a walkway on two sides used only by guards and trusty messengers. I thought it was the ideal place, the farthest from everything else in the joint.
At the next meal, I went to my regular seat. When the hall was full, I stood up. “I’d like to have your attention,” I said. “My name is Russell Means, I’m an Oglala Lakota patriot and a leader of the American Indian Movement. I’m in here for riot to obstruct justice. AIM has a lot of lawyers and we’re willing to work with any and all of you about prisoners’ rights.” As soon as I opened my mouth, doors clanged shut to seal off the room. The guards scrambled into gas masks and broke out shotguns. I kept talking. I said, “That’s what AIM is here for, and we’re going to shake up this—”
I was interrupted by a standing ovation. The entire prison population cheered and clapped. When I sat down, a guard wrote me up for “inciting to riot.” When I went to the kangaroo court that purports to dispense justice to inmates, a prison official said, “What do you have to say for yourself?” I said, “Even though we’re paying our debts to society, we still have First Amendment rights. What I said in there was that I’m willing, through AIM, to help anyone who needs a lawyer to pursue a case involving prisoners’ rights. If you want to deny any of us, including those in AIM, the right to legal counsel, then I’m guilty.” They let me off with a warning never to do that kind of thing again.
A few days later, South Dakota Governor Harvey Wollman came to see me. Governor Richard Kneip had just resigned to become U.S. ambassador to Singapore, and Wollman had become governor. Ignoring what anyone else might think, he came just to meet me and shake my hand. He said, “I admire you and I’m proud of what you stand for—except I don’t like your methods.” Ah yes, my methods—I had heard that before. I guess that meant he was against self-defense.
In acknowledging the prison walls, I had also determined that I would be courteous to the guards. So, “Yes, sir,” “No, sir,” “Please,” “Thank you,” “Excuse me,” “You’re welcome,” and all the other polite phrases were in constant use whenever I spoke. That astonished the guards, who represent the bottom 7 percent of the human race, people with little intelligence who make their living using force and fear to warehouse human beings and violence to purvey a point of view. The screws must have thought that an AIM leader demonized by the media as a tough, militant diehard would act in prison like a juvenile delinquent, pouting and throwing tantrums. When I presented myself as a polite and considerate person, it blew them away. They went on their best behavior and began to call me “Mr. Means” instead of “Hey, Means.” Soon those guards, so eager for the slightest excuse to bash a prisoner’s head open or throw him into solitary, lost their fear of me. Many came to the walkway outside my cell to ask about AIM and why I had done—or hadn’t done—things they had read about in a newspaper. They wanted the truth, and I told it.
I put in for a job as the chaplain’s runner, as messengers are called. The chaplain had an opening for only half a day, so I worked mornings. We got along very well. He never asked me to carry a message or fetch something from another part of the prison. I think he respected me and didn’t want to demean me with petty errands among the general population, but he had no qualms about keeping his afternoon runner hopping around Granite City. I wouldn’t have minded roaming around, but I admired him for not making me a messenger boy. Instead, although he occasionally asked me to do some typing, I mostly used his typewriter for my own correspondence.
Following my dad’s advice, I sought to turn a bad thing into a good thing by learning what made the white man tick. I spent most afternoons in the prison law library reading, mostly about criminal, Indian, and prisoners’ rights cases. I also read Kim II Sung’s book on revolution. It had been smuggled in long before and stashed among the statutes; someone told me where to find it. When I decided to study the Eurocentric male’s worldview, friends outside sent me books by European philosophers. I read Engels, Marx, Descartes, Locke, Rousseau, Plato, and Aristotle—not everything, of course, but enough. Only Aristotle had a clue about liberty, but look how far back that was! Rousseau had some worthwhile views, but that was because of what he had learned from Indians about individual freedom through representative government. I found it amazing. After reading those alleged philosophers who knew nothing about human liberation, I made up my mind that I was no longer a militant but a born-again “primitive.” I would rely on the wisdom of my ancestors.
Among the other prisoners were many AIMsters, including Kenny Kane, who was serving time for having violated his parole during the Mission Golf Club incident. He served nearly five years—about four in solitary confinement because he wouldn’t take shit from anyone, especially guards. He wasn’t allowed reading material in solitary, so he passed the time taking care of his hair by biting off the split ends one by one. Each time he got out of the hole, he would do something to get written up. Then back he would go. Maybe he shouldn’t have done some of the things he did, but he was determined to show that he couldn’t be broken. Another AIM brother who was constantly in solitary was Vincent Bad Heart Bull, serving seven years for burglary. It was his brother Wesley who had been stabbed to death by Darld Schmitz. Because of Vincent’s name, the guards picked on him and wrote him up for the slightest infraction. He, too, never broke.
The warden was Herman Solem, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel. The cons called him “Herm the Sperm.” We had some good talks and eventually developed a grudging respect for each other. When I arrived, he let the press in to talk to me because he knew they would interview him too. He was no fame-seeking fool. The prison needed certain things, and he used his time on the tube to lobby for them.
The biggest story in Granite City, of course, was my fast. Herm became far less cooperative with the media after word got out that I wasn’t eating. Once I began to look gaunt, he wouldn’t let me be interviewed anymore. I imagine he was under pressure from his superiors in Pierre. Whatever the reason, he did what he could to foster the impression that I was eating secretly. He had some reporters interview Major Rist, head of the guard force, who said, “We can’t say for sure that he’s eating, but we see him in the mess hall and we see him go into the commissary.” Of course I was in those places—I was fasting, but that didn’t mean I didn’t use soap, shaving cream, toothpaste, and other essentials, or that I had given up my opportunity for mess-hall camaraderie.
By suggesting that I wasn’t fasting, Herm created a “controversy” that helped me get even more publicity. The prison doctor, who knew that I had suffered from a bleeding ulcer since my trial in Sioux Falls, began calling me in daily to check my urine, because starvation first affects the liver and bowels. That was fine with me. I had been a hustler for so long that I knew how to manipulate the system; so to relieve the boredom and break up the routine, every morning I told the doctor that my hemorrhoids were bothering me. They weren’t, but once I said that, I got to soak every day in a hot tub for about an hour, relaxing and reading before I went to “work” in the chaplain’s office and then to the law library. All that time, of course, prison authorities were trying to find a way to make me eat. They got a few people to try to start conversations with me about eating, but it was no use.
Even during my fast, my mother never visited. She said she didn’t want to see me in prison. Ted and Bill came once each. Peggy was there every two weeks, braving blizzards or ice storms or tornadoes to drive clear across the state. Sometimes she brought my kids, especially Scott. When I needed someone at the worst time in my life, Peggy was there. I’ll always love her for that.
Eventually, starvation began to take a toll on my strength. I could no longer make it around the ball field during exercise period. I had to stop halfway. Then, walking up and down five tiers to my cell got to be a mighty labor. I had to rest several times en route. Finally, when I could barely stand, a prison doctor ordered me into a Sioux Falls hospital.
Almost immediately, Herm came to see me. He pulled a chair next to my bed and in a low voice said, “We know how weak you are. We know you’re not foolish enough to try to make a break. That’s why we trust you and we’re going to leave your room unguarded. If anybody wants to visit you, it’s up to the hospital to grant permission.” I just looked at him, thinking, yeah, right—the state’s most hated Indian, a maximum-security prisoner, and they’re not going to watch me? I’m sure the place was crawling with plainclothes cops. If I had tried to walk out, they would have shot me. It was so obviously a setup that I lost all respect for Herm. At about one in the morning, he was back to say, “Well, the press got wind that I’d left you unguarded, so we had to put men around the hospital.”
Right!
What I didn’t know when I started my fast was that in the United States, unlike England, prison authorities, and therefore the state, are responsible for the well-being of prisoners in their charge. Families of injured prisoners can sue for damages. The next morning, the thirty-fifth day of my water-only fast, court was convened by telephone. South Dakota Circuit Judge Wayne Christensen, attending a conference in Spearfish, a resort town northwest of Rapid City, got on a conference call with state Attorney General Mark Meirhenry and me. Mark said he wanted to have me force-fed. I said, “No way!” The judge asked, “What will you do if I order them to feed you?”
If they were going to strap me down and jam tubes into me, I would have been too weak to resist physically. I could have argued that the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of religion, gave me the right to a spiritual fast, but judging by Christensen’s tone of voice, I didn’t think he cared about anything I told him. I said, “I’ll follow the court’s ruling.” The next day, he ruled that I was to be force-fed if necessary. Nurses gave me my first nourishment intravenously.
Soon after that, I was astonished by a visitor. The man whom I had publicly called George “Custer” McGovern came in and chatted with me. The senator gave me a copy of his memoirs, Grass Roots. When he autographed it, he wrote, “To a man I do not understand, and probably never will.” I loved him for being honest. That remains one of my favorite inscriptions. Although I was impressed with McGovern and came to admire him, I’ll never forgive him for his actions during Wounded Knee, when he encouraged the feds to wipe us out.
When McGovern left, the press came in. They could see then that authorities had lied about my fast, and that rumors planted by the sellouts and others who had condemned me as a fake were lies. I had lost almost seventy pounds—I was down to 135—and looked as if I were straight from a Nazi concentration camp. Doctors told the media I had come dangerously close to damaging my liver. My fast actually cured my bleeding ulcer—it just disappeared. After I recovered my strength, I began a program of jogging and running, a regimen that continues to this day. Before that, I had thought regular exercise was silly and that youth lasted forever.
About two weeks after I had begun to eat again, AIM planned a two-day rally for Dicky and me outside the prison walls. On the morning of that day, I walked, with a Sisseton Sioux named Sidney Kitto, into the yard for morning exercise. Something was strange. There were no guards in sight. I don’t remember another time when that had happened.
Suddenly a kid came running up with a big pipe wrench and whacked the back of Kitto’s head. As Kitto doubled over in pain, I turned around to watch the kid run away. When I turned back again, there was a guy I had never seen before. He stabbed me just below my left nipple with a shank—a made-in-prison knife. I said, “You motherfucker!” and he came at me again. I tried to kick him in the balls, but I missed. A skin named Rich—a weight lifter who worked in the kitchen—was on the mess-hall loading dock. Before I could be stabbed again, Rich grabbed a garbage can and bounced it off my assailant, yelling for him to drop the shank. The man with the shank snarled, “You fucking snitch,” then turned and ran.
I chased him back around the kitchen and into the cellblock. A wall of guards standing almost shoulder to shoulder parted to admit him, then closed ranks. When not one guard tried to disarm him, I shouted, “What are you doing? Why are you protecting that punk?”
“We’re not protecting anyone!” said a supervisor.
“Bullshit!” I said as skins came running from everywhere. The man who had attacked me held his shank until Vincent Bad Heart Bull broke through the line of guards to kick him in the face and then in the groin. Guards surged forward. In the heartbeat before the brawl blossomed into a full-scale riot, Dicky jumped in front, yelling, “Wait! Stop! It’s a setup!”
He was so obviously right that we stopped. Somebody with a lot of power in that prison was willing to risk the lives of many guards to stop me. Those skins were really pissed—I’ve never seen them like that before or since. If Dicky hadn’t saved the day, we would have seized that prison and done serious damage, and probably killed several of the most notorious racists and sadists among the guards.
Instead, we dispersed peacefully. I was sewed up and brought back shirt-less to meet the press. Although the blade had penetrated deeply, it was deflected by a rib and once again had missed my vital organs. I met then with Marlon Brando, Harry Belafonte, and Bill Kunstler, who had flown in for the planned rally. I felt very honored, and surprised that Harry was there. During the Wounded Knee trial, I had embarrassed myself by getting drunk in his New York apartment and being disrespectful to him, so he had plenty of reason to ignore me. That is not Harry’s way, however. The rally lasted two days. Accompanied by the media, Brando, Clyde Bellecourt, and Kunstler were allowed into the prison to speak to Indian prisoners.
A Sioux Falls grand jury investigated the incident. I was subpoenaed to testify, and said all I knew was that I had turned around and been stabbed. The assailant, a man named Schillinger, also testified, along with several others. An all-white grand jury decided that I was at fault—in effect, that my chest had attacked his knife. Bad Heart Bull was sent to solitary for having thumped Schillinger. In contrast, although he admitted to having a deadly weapon, my attacker wasn’t even punished. He was transferred from maximum-security Sioux Falls to Oxford, a medium-security federal pen in Wisconsin. The man who had attacked Kitto, Schillinger’s constant companion, became a trusty and was moved to a cottage outside the walls.
After the rally, Milo Goings, the AIMster who had been wounded in the knee at Wounded Knee, assigned himself as my bodyguard. In the ensuing week, I learned quite a bit about the pig who had stabbed me. He belonged to the Aryan Brotherhood, a white-supremacist prison group, and a few years earlier had allegedly knifed other inmates in other federal prisons. The most curious thing about Schillinger was that he was a federal prisoner serving time in a state prison. He wasn’t the only such in Granite City. The United States reimburses the states for those convicted of federal offenses who request transfers to be close to their families. Schillinger, however, had never been in South Dakota before and had no kin there. There was no legitimate reason for his transfer to Sioux Falls just before I began to serve my time. Although he was a recent arrival who had killed or injured three other dark-skinned prisoners, authorities immediately made him a trusty. It seems that with Schillinger’s history, there could have been only one reason for him to be in the South Dakota State Penitentiary—to kill me. If he had succeeded, I’m sure he would have been freed or otherwise rewarded.
Indians constituted a third of the prison population, but with a few exceptions, they behaved like a beaten people, oppressed by inmates and warders. Even before ending my fast, I worked to form an AIM chapter in the prison. There were other behind-the-walls groups such as the all-white Granite City Jaycees, with officers, bylaws, and monthly meetings with refreshments and speakers from outside. Every morning, AIM held a meeting in the yard, and almost 90 percent of the Indian inmates attended. Many white bikers, attracted by AIM’s views on individual liberty, also joined us. I gave speeches about freedom and independence and what I had learned in the law library about prisoners’ rights. We petitioned for recognition as an official group, but of course the warden refused.
The most effective civil-rights action in prison is a meal boycott, because it’s dramatic and it costs the state money for spoilage and garbage. The bosses start to listen when you refuse to eat in their mess hall. AIM organized two such food strikes. The first made the media sit up and pay attention to what was going on behind the walls. When we planned a second one, we invited the Jaycees to join us. Their president lived two cells from me. He said, “We ain’t joining.” When I told the AIM guys, they said, “Let’s play football.” At that time in that prison, major disagreements between groups of inmates were settled by playing flag football. Shanks, shivs, and other weapons weren’t allowed on the field, but even so, our brand of ball was about ten times as violent as an NFL game. Players wore no padding but were allowed to use teeth, fingernails, elbows, knees, feet—any part of the body. The team that was still standing at the end of the game won the debate. The Jaycees were in charge of recreation equipment—basketballs, volleyballs, golf clubs, barbells, whatever. Milo and I walked up to their rec shack and I said, “Tomorrow night, the field, football, AIM against the Jaycees. Got that?” They nodded their heads. Once the challenge was made, it’s either ball play or knife play. That evening as I stood in the shower line, the Jaycee president slipped in behind me and said, “Russ, we’re going to join your boycott.”
Between AIM meetings and boycotts, Herm knew what I was doing behind the walls. I think it worried him. After three months in prison with an impeccable disciplinary record, I was eligible for trusty. I went before a board and gave them my yes-sir, no-sir, thank-you-sir routine. After stalling for a week, they notified me that I would become a trusty. Then I put in for a transfer to the trusty cottage, outside the walls.
Trusties get a few hours of unsupervised release every month. At first I got four hours, then eight, and finally twelve hours a month, the maximum.
I could go downtown and do nearly anything I wanted as long as I was back for the evening count. When I was made a trusty, I applied for work release. Some white community activists volunteered to find me a job, but no business in Sioux Falls would take me. The activists got in touch with Jim Abourezk, who had a local office, and he hired me. I was the only convict ever to work for a U.S. senator while doing time. Prison officials were really pissed. They had been sure I would never get a job. My wages, $3.54 an hour, were paid directly to the prison to offset the cost of my incarceration.
At work, I studied everything in the office files about Indian water rights. Soon I knew about nearly everything of consequence in that field that had happened within the United States. That knowledge would be useful to me during the years in trying to understand incidents that had occurred on Indian reservations. In that way, prison became a kind of graduate school for me. In a manner of speaking, I got my Ph.D. in white studies. My job ended in January 1979, when Jim decided not to run for reelection.
While looking for another job, I heard from Wayne Duchaneaux, a young man I had met at the Green Grass sun dance a few years earlier. His brother ran the Rapid City Indian Service Council, a social-service center based in the Mother Butler Catholic mission. He hired me, and I got a room in the Alcoholics Anonymous halfway house, located in the same building that had housed the old Butler Center five years earlier. I was back where AIM had planned its protests and demonstrations before Wounded Knee.
Living there, I had to go to an AA meeting every Wednesday night. It always started with people introducing themselves—“I’m Michael and I’m an alcoholic.” Despite years of binge drinking and the blackouts and lapses in judgment I had suffered before I quit drinking, I didn’t consider myself or most Indian people of my generation to be alcoholics. I still feel that with some exceptions, most of us have drinking problems only because of what the white man has done to our lives. Whenever I had to introduce myself at AA meetings, I always said, “My name is Russell Means. I’m a convict.”
Rapid City didn’t have many good restaurants, but I made it a point to visit as many as I could and to make sure I was seen by the rednecks. I knew it would ruin their meal. Sure enough, every time I was seen enjoying myself, the place would be full of people mumbling and grumbling, “That goddamn guy’s supposed to be in prison! What’s this world coming to?” They gulped down their food or left it uneaten. I’m sure some people wrote to complain about me. I loved it that my movements were reported in the press, often in breathless front-page stories that mentioned where I had been sighted and what I was doing.
I was the Indian Service Council’s second-in-command, and we were doing a good job in the community; I could see things slowly improving. But I had been working in Rapid City for only about two or three weeks when Duchaneaux didn’t show up at the council office. All that week, he didn’t come to work. To this day, I don’t know where he went or why. He just vanished without a word of explanation. One morning as I got ready for work, prison guards came and said, “You’ve got to go back.”
I said, “Wait a minute while I call the warden.” On the phone, Herm said, “I’m sorry, I can’t let you stay there. You’ve got no supervision.”
I replied that the board of directors supervised me. “No,” he said, “got to have it on the job.”
I said, “You can tell everyone in America how successful your work-release program is. You put Russell Means out on a job and in weeks he shot right to the top. That’s successful work release.”
“Nice try, Russell,” said Herm. “Get your ass back to Sioux Falls.”
I returned to that damn cottage. It had rooms instead of cells, so living there was better than being inside the walls, but it was still an impersonal institution with a long list of arbitrary rules to deny personal freedom. One of the things I’ve noticed among white people is that the ultra rich and the ultra poor have similar lifestyles. If you dress them alike and don’t allow them to speak—their diction is noticeably different—they would get along perfectly, because both are trashy. Rich whites are brought up with nannies and governesses and servants, so they never have to take care of themselves. Poor whites in that cottage lived just that way. Their rooms looked as if they had been bombed. I was infuriated to learn that they smoked in the shower and threw cigarette butts in the drain and in toilet bowls. When I bathed in the trusty cottage and guys came in with cigarettes dangling from their lips, I made them leave.
“When you’re around me, here’s what you’ve got to do. Smoke out there, finish your cigarette, put the damn thing out in an ashtray, and then take your shower,” I told them. It pissed them off, but I didn’t care.
Once I understood that the opposite extremes of white society are really one and the same, I was no longer astonished by a U.S. space program that leaves trash on the moon and everywhere else it goes—or by strip-mining, clear-cutting of timber, and everything the industrial society does to despoil our Grandmother, the earth.
The next guy who hired me was the president of the local NAACP chapter, a black man who owned a small business. I became his marketing director, and did so well for him that he gave me 10 percent of the business. We called a big press conference to announce it. I loved shoving that down the throats of South Dakota rednecks. When I heard that South Dakota’s judges were having a convention in Sioux Falls’s most prestigious hotel, the downtown Holiday Inn, my boss and I made sure we got a good table there. When Attorney General Meirhenry and all those judges broke for their noon meal, they entered the restaurant to see a black man and me dining in style. That room was pretty quiet for a while. When Herm heard about it, he called and said, “Russ, lay off. Give us a break.” It got so that he hated seeing or hearing my name in the media because the story usually mentioned him, too.
At one of my prison press conferences, I said, “It’s time for the cowboys and Indians to get together.” Not long after that, Ken Tilsen’s son Mark and some other guys came to visit me at the wholesaler. They told me they wanted to unite the white ranchers and Indian peoples of the Great Plains to fight the multinational corporations who planned to strip-mine in the Black Hills. Among others, Union Carbide and Kerr-McGee, which became notorious through the Silkwood case, had located deposits of gold, taconite iron ore, and high-grade uranium. I was honored that they had come all the way to Sioux Falls to share their plans. Although the alliance couldn’t be my first priority until I was out of prison and had rebuilt AIM, I thought it was a good idea. Soon after that, Mark, Bruce Ellison, my sister Madonna, and several white ranchers formed the Black Hills Alliance.
I wrote a proposal, and through contacts with national church groups, my boss/partner got a grant—several thousand dollars—to expand the business. He promptly emptied the till and left town. His creditors were left holding empty bags, and I was out of a job again.
My colleagues in the trusty cottage included a black man who had worked during his sentence with a white inmate to invent a pick-proof lock. When the white guy got out of prison, he gave his partner all rights to the invention. I became friends with the black guy—I’ve forgotten his name. We agreed that after our releases, we would go into business together to manufacture locks. About two weeks before his scheduled release date, a white biker reported him for taking some extra bread from the mess hall. The black guy couldn’t ignore that. The inflexible macho code of the streets and jails demanded that he nail that biker for snitching on him. I was there when it happened. The biker was sitting in an easy chair when my friend, cursing him as a snitch, poked about fifteen holes in him. The biker didn’t die, but the black guy had to go back behind the walls for a few more years. We still planned to go into business together, but I couldn’t until he got out of prison.
My last work-release job was for Legal Aid. After a few days in that office, I was eligible for parole. When I went before the parole board, it could have set me free that very day or forced me to wait up to 120 days. The board members made me wait, no doubt hoping I would get into some kind of trouble so they could keep me longer. When I was finally released in August 1979, I had served a year, three days, and 22.5 hours.
Most cons leaving prison give away their possessions. I kept only a few clothes and some treasured gifts, including a leather briefcase and belt that Dicky Marshall had made for me. My last stop in Granite City was to clear my personal account with Major Rist. Before turning over my money, he insisted on deducting twenty dollars for the denim coat I was wearing, a gift from an inmate who had altered it into a stylish, beaded, waist-length jacket. I stacked my things on the sidewalk. Then Peggy came with my kids. After we had kissed a while, I was so excited that I jumped behind the wheel of her car and took off with them, leaving all my stuff on the sidewalk. Until officials mailed it to me, I didn’t even miss it, because I was a free man.